Deploying an enterprise-class Software Lifecycle Management solution for Test Program Sets

Information Technology tools for Software Lifecycle Management have advanced in recent years to enable organizations to implement a more centralized, enterprise-level lifecycle management solution. Despite these tools having become commonly used in the software development world, the Test Program Set (TPS) community remained behind the times. This paper presents the history and implementation of TPS Lifecycle Management as deployed by the TPS community for the Consolidated Automated Support System (CASS) Family of Testers (FoT). Prior to any efforts to enact centralized TPS lifecycle (i.e. configuration) management, TPS owners controlled their software in a variety of ways. The results of their efforts could be characterized as barely effective and often problematic. The initial attempt at solving the TPS lifecycle management problem was to mandate the use of a commercially available product which was not well supported by the developer of the application. That, coupled with both political issues and technical problems, relegated this system to becoming simply a repository for data. After addressing many of the problems with the initial solution and moving to a more widely-used product, the next iteration of TPS lifecycle management has been much more successful. It has become a legitimate enterprise solution providing both version control and implementing change management principles to include traceability between software change requests and released code. Many of the specific design details are discussed in the paper and include: a flexible workflow, a defined code branching strategy, an ownership and protection scheme and a process for release. The paper concludes with a detailed example of how TPS lifecycle management has benefitted the CASS team and, in particular, those who provide support of TPSs. It also shows how those benefits can be attained by other TPS support teams looking to effectively manage their test programs on other types of Automatic Test Equipment.